Consider for a moment how little we can feel when we see genuinely awful suffering.
Be it a homeless man on the street; or desperate poverty when you’re abroad; or a story of some heinous crime in the news.
Now, we might be a bit moved sometimes, but I would wager that most of the time we skim past these things without giving much thought. Our emotions are perhaps especially low considering how you would feel if you were the one in that situation.
And furthermore, what emotions do arise, I think, often arise out of an intellectual knowledge of the suffering rather than a deep sympathy for the situation before us.
Why?
This isn’t historically true? Is it?
Maybe it is, but I’m wondering if a massive part of this today is that most people we see… are virtual. We see far more people on screens that we do in real life. Think how many hundreds of faces you can scroll past in a single hour on a device, or during a TV show, or watching the news.
When most humans we see aren’t actually real people in front of us, I wonder if that detachment accumulates. And, before long, maybe we struggle to put ourselves in the shoes of people in front of us.
“People” are, maybe, slowly interpreted more as characters on an app than real humans who feel the same way you do.
And if they’re just characters, like in a film or a TV show, then why would we empathise as much?
Now, you might (very fairly) dispute some of my basic assumptions here, I’m just shooting the breeze to be honest.
But, before you get too upset, I’ve actually come across some thinking on this:
Apparently, charities know very well that they will get more donations if in their advertising they feature just one child in poverty, rather than a crowd of people who are in poverty. I saw this first in this Alex O’Connor video (10:45 onwards), where he explains how there’s a sort of “diminishing returns” when it comes to emotions evoked by a sad event. (I’d recommend the video for good vibes and his Substack for more of his excellent content).
That is, when one person dies, we feel sad. When we hear 2 people have died, do we feel twice as sad? Have our sad emotions literally doubled? And when you expand this out, 1,000,000 people have died - is hearing this 1,000,000 times worse? Of course not.
So there is something going on here.
Of course this isn’t purely a function of what I detailed above about what one might call the “digitization of our perception of other humans”. But is this digitization fuelling what is apparently an already known phenomenon about the diminishing returns of emotions? I can’t imagine it helps.
What would the effect be if we did feel more strongly when we saw injustice or sadness? To be honest, it might just be too overwhelming, and maybe we’ve almost evolved some level of resilience to this given the inherent suffering of lived experience known throughout human history.
I’m not sure, and neither am I an expert on this.
But I am quite concerned about the impact of social media, and that is something I’ve read and thought about.
Maybe I’ll look more into this in the future. But, for now, I might just try to remember that those people on my screen are (probably) real.